


Tidal Force

by fineandwittie



Category: Fast & Furious (Movies), Fast Five (2011)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Alternate Ending, Angst with a Happy Ending, Discussion of Violence, Dom and Brian deal with Brian's crazy willingness to throw every single thing away for Dom, Dom's Temper, Explicit Language, Let's deal with the wrench in there room, M/M, Sort of Happy, Well - Freeform, Well they talk about it anyway, i just really like my boys being in pain, what can i say
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-04
Updated: 2020-06-04
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:28:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24538498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fineandwittie/pseuds/fineandwittie
Summary: When the dust settles in Rio, Mia's had a miscarriage. She moves in with Elena to work through her grief, leaving Dom and Brian to share the bungalow. One evening, they have a discussion.
Relationships: Brian O'Conner/Dominic Toretto
Comments: 6
Kudos: 161





	Tidal Force

When it was all over and the dust had cleared, when the team has dispersed and it was just Brian and Dom and Mia, like usual, Mia miscarried. It changed some fragile thing about her relationship with Brian that she couldn’t put her finger on. It made the loss worse in some intangible way that she felt in her bones. 

Too overwhelmed by grief, she’d swapped places with Dom. Elena, who knew grief better than almost anyone, had offered to help Mia through hers.

Which left Brian and Dom sharing the bungalow by the beach. Long, slow days in the garage working on all manner of illegal mods. Lazy evenings when Dom cooked and Brian cleaned, because they both knew better than to let Brian near indoor cookware. They settled into a strange little domestic routine.

It was nearly unbearable for Brian, who was finally getting exactly what his heart had longed for all these years, but it was only a facade. He wanted this domesticity with Dom, but he wanted everything else too. Mia’s departure had finally opened his eyes to all the things he’d spent the last six years lying to himself about.

So he lived out one of his most shameful fantasies, knowing that it was a death by a thousand pinpricks. His heart could only take so much, but he would never turn Dom away. There really was no choice.

That is until, sitting out on the porch in creaking wicker chairs, watching the sunset, they both had one beer too many. They floated in the beautiful stage between sober and tipsy. Their limbs a little looser, their tongues as well, the tensions drained out of shoulders and pain from behind their eyes. 

“You don’t seem to be grieving for your kid, Brian.” Dom’s question broke the stillness. The peace.

Brian cursed himself and Dom. “Yeah. I guess…it just never really felt real. She wasn’t showing and it was over so quickly. And I—“ He stopped, considered leaving it there. “And I never wanted a kid to begin with. This is no kind of life for a child. We’re wanted criminals.”

Dom nodded, watching Brian softly, his eyes half-lidded. “Would you have let me kill Hobbs with that wrench?”

Brian reeled back at this, a whole body movement like being drunk, like absorbing a blow. “Whoa, what?”

Dom blinked and raised an eyebrow. “Legitimate question. If Mia hadn’t intervened, would you have stood back and allowed me to beat Hobbs’ head in with a wrench?”

Brian breathed, quiet and steady, through his parted mouth, tried to steady himself in the face of this. Dom watched him, not prompting, not impatient. He looked like he’d be willing to wait all night for an answer. Brian didn’t have the emotional energy to defend against Dominic Toretto. He never had. 

He remembered the burning rage that had twisted Dom’s face into a Picasso. He remembered the mindlessness of the fight and the men standing around with guns, ready to kill him, to kill them all. He remembered, most of all, his own surge of quiet desperation. It had filled him in a flash, the instant he saw Dom pick up the wrench. A thousand possibilities had run through his mind, but foremost was the knowledge that Dom would kill Hobbs. That this time there would be no bus rides or janitorial jobs on the other end of this beating, no money that Dom had secreted away into an account to pay for medical bills. Just a caved-in skull, gore splattered across Dom’s skin, and another escape plan. Only this time, the team would leave. Scatter to the winds.

Rome, Tej, Han and Gisele, Leo, and Santos, even Vince, none of them signed up to watch Dom beat someone to death. The team, the family, had coalesced around Dom and Brian, on a foundation of righteousness. If Dom and Brian weren't the good guys, everything dissolved. 

Brian wouldn’t have guaranteed even Mia staying behind after that. She hadn’t been there when Dom had attacked Linder, but Brian didn’t doubt she’d seen pictures. Maybe she’d even seen the man himself, the wreckage of his face. 

But Brian wasn’t like the others. His reasons for being there weren’t theirs. “Yeah. I would have.”

Dom nodded, eyes boring into the side of Brian’s face, where he’d turned back toward the ocean. “Why?”

“Why does anyone do anything, Dom? I don’t know. Because.” Brian’s voice had gone defensive and hard.

“You always do that, Bri. I want to understand why.”

“Do what?” Brian shoved a hand into his hair and yanked his way through the salt-encrusted tangles, avoiding Dom's gaze. 

“You always stand back and allow me to do whatever I want. And when it inevitably goes to shit because I made a bad call, because I couldn’t control myself, you’re always there, trying to fix it, giving pieces of yourself away. For me. Because of me.” Brian was shaking his head, but Dom just kept on talking. “You did it with your career with the LAPD six years ago. You did it again with the FBI last year.” He was ticking off on his fingers each incident. “You did it again with Braga in that church. And again with Hobbs and I’m sure there’s half a dozen other times you’ve done it. Small times, when it’s merely an inconvenience or a frustration rather than something life shattering.”

Brian shrugged helplessly, turning to look at Dom. If he confessed, if he answered Dom’s questions, he’d lose the one thing that he couldn’t be without. So he stayed silent.

“You would have watched me cave Hobbs’s head in with a wrench, Brian, and done nothing to stop me. Said nothing. There wasn’t really anything in your eyes when I looked up at you, when Mia…The others all look sick about it or terrified or confused. You were just watching. What were you thinking about?” Dom’s eyes had gone hooded.

Brian swallowed convulsively. Something dark and ominous and suffocating was lurking in Dom’s gaze and Brian felt an answering beast in his own chest. “Ways to get you out without getting us killed.”

Dom’s nostrils flared. “You couldn’t have gotten the team out of there. There were too many of us and too many of them.”

Brian breathed, watched the play of shadows over Dom’s face. “I never said the team, Dom. I wasn’t thinking about the team." Dom's lids fluttered for a beat before his eyes widened. "I was thinking about you and how many years in a SuperMax killing Hobbs was going to get you. I was thinking about how many of Hobbs’s men were in that room and how many kill shots I could snap off before I would need to start dodging bullets. I was thinking about which exit would be best to leave through and if taking one of the cars would be possible. I was wondering whether or not you were safe to touch because if I needed to get you away from Hobbs’s corpse, you might take a swing at me with that wrench without really knowing what you were doing. Or while knowing exactly what you were doing. I was wondering how much damage it would do to me and whether I could catch it on my arm or shoulder and still be able to drive.”

Dom’s mouth had parted on a hissing exhale while Brian spoke. His eyes were darker now, black with something Brian couldn’t put a name to, and he seemed to crackle in the cool night breeze. Brian never should have opened his mouth, he realized. What he'd ended up saying was worse than the _I love you_ that had been pushing on the back of his teeth earlier. More telling.

“Again. You were going to save me again. Give up everything again. You knew Mia was pregnant, that she likely wouldn’t follow you after watching that. You knew the team wouldn’t be behind us after. You were going to give up everything. Again.” Dom’s voice was a murmur like the crashing waves of the Atlantic that Brian remembered from Miami. Quiet and filled with something so immense that Brian wasn’t sure it even had a name.

Brian nodded once, but said nothing. It really was too late for that.

Dom stood, towered, cast long shadows across Brian’s body, and took the two steps necessary to close the distance between them. Brian prepared himself for violence, for disaster, for pain. But instead, Dom slid to his knees at Brian’s feet, fluid motion and coiled power supplicant to Brian’s sacrifice. His eyes went wide as he stared down at Dom, his breathing pattering against the night air like the footsteps of a drunkard. 

“Brian, I—I’ve never…I can’t see whatever it is you see in me. I don’t understand why you're so convinced that I deserve to be saved, no matter what I do. No matter who I hurt. I’m the reason we’re fugitives. I’m the reason all our lives fell apart. First with the trucks and then my vendetta for Letty and again with my determination to see Vince again. Brian…every decision I’ve ever made has crashed at the finish line. Every time, you’re there. You’re pulling me from the wreckage like you did when I crashed the Charger. There is nothing in me that deserves that. I’m not brilliant, or steadfast, or trustworthy. I’m not a good man. I’m not worth your sacrifices.” The rasping velvet voice of his cracked and he pressed his face into Brian’s knees.

“Dom, it’s not about being good or trustworthy or brilliant. It’s not about being worthy. I did it because I wanted to. Because I _needed_ to. I’m going to keep doing it until one of us is dead. There’s nothing you can say that will change that.”

Dom flinched against Brian’s body, hard enough that Brian could feel it, and pulled back. His eyes had lost that unfathomable depth. They shown shallow and sharp, like broken glass embedded in his flesh. His face was hollowed out and empty. “You love me.” Brian stopped breathing. “You know how worthless I am, how worthless I’ve been, and you hate it. Don’t you? You hate loving me. Don't you? Brian, please, I—I can stand anything, but that. Anything but having what I want most in the world but at a price too high for either of us to pay. I never wanted it like this. Not…God, I’m sorry. So sorry for everything. All of it.”

That wasn’t right. Brian knew it wasn’t right, but couldn’t quite seem to pull his thoughts together. He was too busy watching with a kind of abject horror rising in his belly, as Dom’s broken-glass eyes shuddered and flattened out. He swallowed and tilted his bald head back against his shoulders. Brian wasn’t sure if he was staring at the porch roof, hoping for some kind of strength, or if he was fighting for control. 

He only knew that he could not allow Dom to hide from him. He reached out and took hold of Dom’s face, wrapping his fingers around that back of the man’s skull, and tipped his face back down. 

What he found felt like a knife to the gut: Dom was crying.

“Hey. No. Oh god. I’m sorry. Dom, please don’t—“

Dom tried a smile, but it didn’t really fit across his mouth. “Don’t worry about me, Brian.”

Brian laughed, harsh and bitter. “Dominic, my entire existence revolves around worrying about you.” That was clearly the wrong thing to say because the tears were welling back up in Dom’s eyes, making them glossy. “I do love you. I’ve always loved you. And you’re misunderstanding what I was saying. Please. God, please stop crying. I can’t. Dom, I don’t hate loving you. I don’t regret anything that led us here. And I never, ever thought you were worthless. God, Dom, don’t you understand? You’re everything. You’re written in my bones, the rotation of the planets, the tidal force of the oceans. Jesus Christ. I feel like I was born loving you and there is literally nothing you can do to change it. You could take that stupid fucking wrench to _my_ head and I'd die loving you.”

Brian tilted Dom’s head a little and pressed their mouths together, brief and light, a promise. 

“You are brilliant. You’re one of the smartest men I know. You are trustworthy and steadfast, a rock in the storm. You have the biggest heart of anyone I’ve ever met. You’re worth everything in the world to me. Worth more than…If it’s a choice between you and anyone else on this planet, myself included, I’m going to pick you. I’d trade my life for yours in a heartbeat, Dominic Toretto. Saying I love you is like saying you’re a good driver. It’s not nearly enough, so weak that it’s almost a lie.”

When Brian finally stopped, finally took a breath, Dom surged up and kissed him, hard, nearly angry, and so full of emotion that Brian felt his own eyes cloud with tears. He closed them, feeling Dom’s hands sliding up his leg and across his chest. He tasted salt and lost himself in this thing that he had wanted since the moment that Dominic Toretto had turned around in the back room at Toretto’s Market and met his eyes.


End file.
